Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
You don’t need to have turned on NBC these past weeks to know about Raygun, the goofy Australian breakdancer better than any character hallucinated at 30 Rock. Since she delivered a series of head-scratching performances at the Olympics, scoring a cumulative zero points and getting knocked out in the round robin, she’s become a viral sensation. “I do my thing, and it represents art,” she defended herself to ESPN. “That is what it is about.” Academics dredged up her Ph.D. dissertation on breakdancing. Rachel Dratch parodied her on The Tonight Show, wriggling on the floor in a teal athletic set. Adele even stopped her Munich set to declare the B-girl, whose real name is Rachael Gunn, the best part of the Olympics: “Me and my friends have been s—ting ourselves laughing for 24 hours.”
Since then, an anonymous Change.org petition claiming that Gunn manipulated her way to the Olympics has circulated across the internet and garnered over 45,000 signatures. Gunn has now addressed the backlash against her in an Instagram video, in which she calls the hate “devastating.” “I worked my butt off preparing for the Olympics and I gave my all, truly,” she says. “I’m honored to have been a part of the Australian Olympic team and to be part of breaking’s Olympic debut. What the other athletes have achieved has just been phenomenal.”
Responding to the corruption allegations, she directs her followers to the statement from the Australian Olympic Committee, which condemned the petition. “It is disgraceful that these falsehoods concocted by an anonymous person can be published in this way,” said Matt Carroll, the CEO of the AOC, in an official statement. “It amounts to bullying and harassment and is defamatory … No athlete who has represented their country at the Olympic Games should be treated in this way.”
